Monday, June 21, 2010

Winnipeg

I was just back in Winnipeg.

They are building a new rapid bus lane from downtown, into what use to be Fort Rouge and then on into the former Fort Garry. The City decided this was needed and it is proceeding. For Victoria, it would be like building a special bus lane from Victoria, through Esquimalt and into View Royal. The chances of that happening here in the foreseeable future are nil.

They are moving their football stadium from the west end to the south end. Why? Because it makes sense and they do not have to bicker over doing the right thing. (That is not to say there may not have been some issues - but the old location certainly had traffic flow issues).

Many years ago they built a ditch around the city (a flood way) to protect it from the Red River flooding (yes perhaps the Province did most of this) but it is an apt analogy for Victoria.

Here, if we were to pursue some regional preventative skeem, it would likely apply to some cities and not others. Image a protective ditch that had three major holes in it. Far from useful, but that is what we have often have (not always) when it comes to things that have an impact beyond the block we live on. Policing is different, fire protection is different, land use decisions are different, garbage disposal is different, support for the arts is different, so much which should not be different in our city simply is.

Winnipeg with a population of 680,000 has one city council.
Victoria, well, you know.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Comparing Victoria to Winnipeg, oh please. Winnipeg's problems are monumental.

I met someone from the Montreal area the other day and we discussed amalgamation. They went from 29 municipalities down to one years ago.
It was a disaster and now they are back to 15 with talk of more. Amalgamation was a total failure there as it has been in other places. Halifax is looking at reversing their amalgamation. Every issue has many sides and intelligent discourse looks at all the pros and cons.

Anonymous said...

Winnipegs problems are not caused by the amalgamation, in fact they have been reduced significantly because of it. Montreals problem was that they amalgamated to much to quickly.